The sage covered prairie was surrounded by red and white sandstone monoliths, a stair-step collage of barren Permian surfaces jutting upward from the plain as sawtooth ridges, pinnacles, knobs, and arches.  Squaw Flat was the end of the road when I first visited in the early 1970s.  The air was hot and dry.  An old green tanker containing thousands of gallons of water sat next to a barricade marking the end of vehicle travel.   A spigot at the back of the truck dispensed a warm, acrid liquid to thirsty hikers.  The last quarter mile of rough gravel roadway was littered with dusty campsites.  A sandy-brown, single-wide trailer sat near the park entrance.  The faded wooden sign in front read:  Canyonlands National Park Needles District Visitors Center.

Many years have passed.  I’m in the last week of a month-long camping and hiking adventure.  I left Denver in early October ahead of an early winter storm and headed east into Kansas to view Middle America, to meet locals and find out what they were thinking.  The cold weather forced me into southwestern Kansas and the Oklahoma Panhandle.  Later, I continued south into Texas and southeastern New Mexico.  After yet another premature cold snap, I veered west through southern New Mexico and southeastern Utah.  I spent a night at Sand Island, near Bluff, and drove north through Blanding and Monticello over the eastern lip of the Abajo Mountains.  I stopped briefly to purchase supplies and a bag of candy, some Payday caramel mini bars just in case I encountered some kids in costume at the campground.  It’s Halloween, and the weather was unseasonably cold.  I’m headed to Canyonlands National Park.

State highway 211 begins north of Monticello and winds its way southwest, then northwest for 40 miles.  The route ends at Squaw Flat.  I want to spend a few nights there before heading back to Denver but I’m anxious about this side trip.  Squaw Flat is crowded in the peak Spring and Fall camping seasons, and finding a spot to camp can be difficult.  I pass Newspaper Rock State Historical Monument, a sandstone panel with numerous petroglyphs carved in the Wingate Sandstone.  Several cars are parked there, an ominous sign.  Farther on, I encounter a second parking area, a place for those who enjoy technical climbing in the nearby Wingate, here a towering 200-ft sheer face of scary proportions.  The parking lot is full, and from my vantage point on the road, I can see tiny climbers clinging to the vertical cliff.  I continue west anticipating a crowded campground.

The Needles District is a popular place for campers, hikers, climbers, 4 X 4 enthusiasts, and other assorted desert rats.  The entire route to the park is now paved, and an architect-designed visitor’s center sits near the site of the old trailer.  Today Squaw Flat has flush toilets, palatable well water, designer camp sites, and an amphitheater hosting fireside talks.  There are two campground loops, each home to about 15 sites.  Loop B is north facing, along the north side of a large sandstone ridge, an ideal location to camp in the summer.  I head to south-facing loop A and some sun.  As I round a curve beyond an exposed red rock face, I breath a sigh of relief.  The campground is virtually empty.  I pull into site 8.

Canyonlands National Park is divided into three districts: The Needles, The Maze, and Island In The Sky.  The Island forms the north end of the park, a dissected plateau bordered by the Green and Colorado Rivers.  They join to form the Colorado as it descends inexorably toward to Gulf of California.  Island In The Sky has the highest elevations and the youngest rocks in the park.

The Maze has an appropriate name.  Edward Abbey wrote about it in The Monkey Wrench Gang.  It’s the most remote area of the park, a wild place, a 3-D jigsaw puzzle of colorful rock edifices with names like The Doll House, The Chocolate drops, The Fins, and Spanish Bottom.  I’ve only been to The Maze once, a five day camping trip with friends. Indian lithics were everywhere.  I found a 7,000 year old Plainview spear point, photographed it, and then returned it to a safe place on a mound of cryptogamic soil crust to the consternation of my camping companions.

The Needles is a land of fracturing rocks and erosion.  I’m standing on the Cedar Mesa Sandstone today, a 260 million-year-old Permian desert dune, lake, and river deposit.  The Cedar Mesa is underlain by massive salt deposits of the Paradox Formation, the oldest rock unit in the region.  The Paradox is exposed along the Colorado River bottom where it’s literally being dissolved by flowing water.  Overlying rocks are slowly flowing along with it, maybe an inch a year, causing intense fracturing and slumping.

My visits to The Needles have always been spiritual, a personal mission of enlightenment, hiking and camping in a natural desert setting.  I’m standing at the trailhead kiosk inspecting some posted notices for useful information.  The trailhead is at the edge of the campground.  It’s well marked with signs, one pointing to destinations, another sign warning hikers to carry plenty of water.  There are no other warnings today.  No recent Hanta virus victims or rattlesnake attacks, no psycho killers today.  Three cars sit in the parking lot, all small SUVs, most likely late season backpackers.  I hope they have warm sleeping bags.  The low temperature this morning was 12 degrees.  At 9:00 am it’s a whopping 34 and rising with clear skies and calm winds.  It may reach 55 today, perfect hiking temperature.

I look behind me beyond the parking area toward the campground.  I’ve lost sight of my van, a quarter mile away to the northeast.  It’s hidden by a jutting arm of the ridge separating the two campground loops.  I slowly pivot to the right, facing east at the distant snow-covered peaks of the LaSalle Mountains near Moab at least 50 miles away, then south catching the high peaks of the Abajos west of Monticello, and finally southwest where I’m now headed, toward the Needles, into grassy meadows punctuated by sculptured rock spires and comb-like ridges.  I’m hiking the Squaw-Big Spring loop today.  I always do it clockwise for reasons I’ll describe later.  The hike is 7.5 miles long with a cumulative elevation gain of 800 feet, not a particularly intense trek, but enough up and down to get a workout.  I’ve hiked this route many times.  It’s one of my favorite desert jaunts.

For the first quarter mile, the trail passes through Squaw Flat.  I walk past intermittent patches of red soil adorned with black soil crusts, a delicate living colony of bacteria, mosses, lichens, and fungi, a bustling mass of physical and biological activity.  The well worn path directs me into the low November sun.  The route ahead looks like an outdoor carpet sprinkled with pinion pines, some sandstone nipples and chimneys, a broken low ridge, and weathered sandstone knobs.  In a few thousand years, these red blocks will break down into sand and soil.  Nature works quickly here.  I walk through a half acre patch of rice grass, a source of food for early Native Americans.  I pass more shrubbery, some Chamisa, and other bushes I recognize but can’t identify by name, all basking in the low autumn sun.

I spot a lone, spindly, eight-foot sage bush, more a tree than a bush, old and dying, a few living shoots near its apex.  It’s hopelessly trying to reach for the sun.  The trail soon parallels a deeply rutted drainage, a narrow lane sculpted by the footsteps of thousands of hikers, now abandoned.  There are recent footprints on my trail, boots of various shapes and sizes.  The route rises gently as I approach my first obstacle, a series of stacked sandstone benches, a sloping layer cake ridge, maybe a hundred foot climb.  Rock cairns guide me upward.  I see prickly pear, yucca, juniper, and oak, a sign of increased moisture on the shady north facing abutment.  I scramble up through the red and white layers.

My ascent is along a shallow incised fracture, enabling me to gain a foothold.  I avoid rooted shrubs and climb over a dead juniper near some exposed roots and lichen encrusted surfaces. My boots cling to the dry sandstone slabs as I move up slope.  I pass another dead juniper, some freshly fallen rock wedges, then reach a five-foot face.  The exposed sandstone is cross bedded.  These rocks are eolian dunes from a long lost desert, a windy day in the Permian.  I take a few more steps to my left through a shady recess, up to the highest point along my immediate route.  I look around.  Shallow, meter-sized depressions are filled with wind-blown dust and grass or just anchored soil crusts.  Clumps of loose rock, cairns in need of repair, are scattered about as the sandstone pavement rises to a high point on the ridge a few hundred feet away.

I’m curious and walk to the summit for a view.  I spot some red chert flakes, minute chunks of jasper torn off a rock core by an ancient tool maker.  I see several more flakes.  This could be the work site of an ancient hunter in need of projectile points.  I pick up a piece and inspect it.  There are more cross beds, green and yellow lichen, numerous fractures breaking the smooth surface.  I climb to the top of the sandstone summit with a hands-on-the-sandstone and boots-in-the-crack boost.  I immediately hear a beep. My cell phone feels like an intrusion today.  I have a superb view here, 150 feet above The Flat.  I take in the warm breeze and magnificent surroundings.

I’m back on my well-marked route heading off the ridge top, down to The Flat again, more switch backing off brownish sandstone benches, through a large rift, more down stepping, and finally sage and red soil.  At 1.2 miles, I reach an intersection and a sign post, a decision point.  A left turn would take me to Peekaboo Springs (4 miles).  This route requires descending a long-used slippery metal ladder several feet down a sheer cliff into Peekaboo Canyon.  Not today.  I turn to the right and continue my loop route.  The sign reads:  Squaw Flat campground 6.4 miles.  My path now follows the dry channel of Squaw Creek.  Well placed cairns have been built on prominent boulders along the edges of the dry creek bed. Red and white grainy ledges protrude as overhangs along the canyon margin.  I approach a ledge face of bright red rippled sandstone, a 3-ft rock unit encased in massive brown-weathering sandstone.  The ripples indicate slow-moving water, maybe a short term seasonal fluctuation in moisture, from dry to wet and back to dry again.  Modern day rains come in July and August as monsoon events, heavy downpours filling the creeks and narrows with flood debris.

I climb out of the creek bottom.  I’m now working my way between boulders, across a tributary drainage, down and back up, then more boulders and another short drop in elevation.  I start to climb, switch backing between impediments, some the size of small houses, fallen blocks from the receding cliff face.  I climb higher yet, onto a continuous ledge, weathered and polished, and then up a steep grade to another higher ledge.  I can see my immediate goal, a notch at the base of a much larger saddle, a low point separating two rock needles towering above a nearly continuous ridge a half mile ahead.  I wonder how much time, how many thousands of years will elapse before this scene is unrecognizable.  I trek up onto higher rounded benches, near immense mushroom blocks and fallen slabs, then into an amphitheater, an empty sports arena of polished sandstone with fallen rock spectators.  With the help of some exposed bedding planes, I zigzag along another switchback route up into the bleachers, the highest seats, now empty.  This arena took thousands of years to complete, a mere instant compared to the millions of years of its earlier sedimentary history.  I’m the only human spectator today.  I stare at the geologic performance.

The notch is only a few hundred feet ahead, but the cairns are directing me away to the left toward a sign post and around a bend out of the amphitheater.  I suddenly remember this faded brown sign from previous hikes and walk to it.  An arrow points toward Chesler Park, Druid Arch, and the campground.  According to this, the loop trail to Big Spring Canyon continues to the left rather than through the notch.  The Park Service must have changed the route.  I’m confused.  The cairns leading up to the notch and higher saddle are gone.  The notch is close now, and a sandstone slab still sits at the base, a low step to help navigate the five-foot barrier leading up to a smooth spillway and then up through the saddle above and the high needles.

I’m still confused.  I’ve always hiked through the notch and over the saddle, but curiosity induces me to follow the cairns.  The path continues to the left beyond the sign along a narrow bench shaded by an overhanging cliff.  Squaw Creek drainage lies 150 feet below on my left.  There are stunted juniper trees here and some pinon, an oasis of cool on a hot day.  I follow the trail as it rounds the cliff face onto a wider sandstone platform and suddenly spot it, a long open fracture extending from the drop off all the way to the cliff face on my right.  It disappears into a shallow recess.  I walk closer and look down.  The crevasse is deep.  It has at least a two foot span at the surface where I’m standing but narrows below. My sandstone platform dips downward into the crack on either side as a new predicament eats away my confidence.  Recent hikers have dropped a few rocks into it, maybe hoping to build a bridge, a stepping stone to the other side.  A few larger rocks are wedged at various levels below me, offering a dangerous way to cross.  I consider my situation.  Flubbing this jump would be a serious mistake.  I look toward the rock wall on the opposite side.  There seems to be enough room to land without hitting the wall.  I think I can jump comfortably if I remove my pack. The procedure seems easier said than done for someone who shivers at vertical exposure.  I wander back and forth, spouting at the NPS for changing my route.  I imagine falling in, getting stuck five feet down and yelling until my voice fades.  I would be trapped until another hiker appeared in two or three days.  Can someone extract me?  What if I break a leg and spend the night in freezing temperatures?  Hypothermia?

The fissure widens and deepens quickly as it heads toward the cliff face into Squaw Canyon.  Near the shallow recess on the right, there isn’t room to jump.  My head would most likely hit the rock wall.  I decide to remove my pack.  I tie it to one end of a 20-ft rope, and the other end to my tightly-bundled fleece jacket.  I fling the bundle across, and it lands on the narrow platform next to the wall.  This jump scares me.  I walk along the edge again, back and forth.  The Park Service has succeeded in entertaining me today.  Settling on the best spot, I position myself, take a deep breath, and jump.  Success!  I exert just the right amount of force and avoid the wall.

Then sudden shock and amazement!  My route along the narrow ledge now parallels the widening-fissure for 50 feet but dips down into it at about 30 degrees.  Scary!  To make matters worse, the cliff face forms an overhang requiring that I squat while walking.  I’ve had enough exposure for one day!  After a string of expletives, I reverse direction, throw my fleece back across the crack, and jump again (without pacing back and forth) and land well beyond the crevasse.  My second jump is easy because I don’t have to worry about hitting a wall.  After a short rest, some water, and head shaking, I hike back to the notch still wondering why the Park Service had changed the route.

In 10 minutes, I’m at the signpost again.  I walk up to the base of the notch in zigzag fashion along narrow rock benches.  The notch is a vertical 5-ft barrier, a short dry water fall with an upper ledge forming the base of a well worn spillway.  The spillway ends in the saddle further on, a flat bench between two massive rock needles.  The trail then descends the north side of the saddle into Big Spring Canyon.  I step onto the sandstone slab at the ledge and stare at the spillway from eye level.  There are no notched footholds on the vertical face, but I might be able to wedge a boot tip into one of the bedding plane cracks midway up.  I set my walking stick on the ledge, lift my left leg into a crack, simultaneously grabbing the smooth upper surface with both hands.  I push hard but slip back down onto the rock slab as my hands lose their grip on the smooth sandstone.  I assess my situation.  I remove my pack and set it on the ledge next to my stick.  I‘ve done this trick several times before but can’t recall the details.  The barrier has other cracks, but none seem adequate.  I move to the left and manage to fit my right boot tip into the same crack I used before.  Maybe it’s just the angle?  I try again, pushing hard with as much strength as I can muster.  My boot tip holds as I rise up.  I flop my midsection onto the smooth spillway surface and shimmy further up.  Removing my pack and changing the angle of approach contributed to my success.  I stand and look back.  The amphitheater seems huge and now below me.  I’m in the uppermost row seat of the grandstand.  Looking down, I can’t see the slab below. It would be difficult to descend here without falling.  I know why I always do the Squaw-Big Spring loop trail clockwise.

The spillway rises up to the saddle several hundred feet further on.  It has several potholes or shallow pools filled with stagnant water from the last storm.  A rounded beach ball-sized boulder rests below the lowest pool.  This chunk of rounded rock had apparently rolled down the spillway and anchored after falling from the needles above.  I maneuver around the potholes and reach the flat table top, the saddle itself.  The terrain is highly polished, shining very brightly in a low sun, the end product of the millennial action of wind, water, and ice.  The needles here join to form a high dissected ridge on either side of me extending for a half mile or more in either direction.

I spot a smooth chair-sized boulder and take a late lunch break.  I have a spectacular view to the north, into Big Spring Canyon and beyond, extending to Island in the Sky, 20 miles north.  My cheese sticks, crackers, and dried raisins are a gourmet treat.  My luncheon musings revive a memory from my last visit here when a pair of ravens circled above, waiting patiently for my departure and some hopeful snacks.  I suddenly recall a sign in the campground bathroom, a silhouette of a raven with a warning below: they are clever, curious, and persistent.  I leave them some raisins.

The towering ridge on my left and right is steep and narrow, like a celebratory layer cake of reddish brown sandstone, capped by a thin veneer of white sandstone frosting.  The low saddle along this mile-long spine is a drainage divide separating opposing intermittent streams.  Now the broad valley below me seems flat from my vantage point but is actually dissected by a network of dry flood channels.  My old route down is visible now, first straight down a steep but walkable rock face, then left onto a smooth knob, past some soil and scrub filled potholes, and then onto a protruding ridge and the canyon bottom.  A few scattered rock piles testify to former cairns.  This route, on close inspection, is also worn from years of hikers.

I head down hill, first on my behind as I slide down the initial decent and settle on a narrow terrace.  The exposure doesn’t scare me as I work my way along a steep inclined slope. I’ve done this before, and my footing is firm.  I turn to the right and drop down to another surface below.  This bench continues for several hundred feet.  I see cairns again.  They direct me to the right where I finally enter the canyon.  Cairns are now abundant.  I must have intersected the “official” trail that continued beyond the large crevasse.  It’s too late in the day to reconstruct that route from this end.

I walk for 30 minutes more watching for birds, lizards, fossils, and Paleo-Indian artifacts.  I’m in and out of the drainage, bypassing narrow sections chocked with debris from past flooding.  The trail is easy to follow, mostly along the canyon bottom.  While looking down at slabs of flat rock, I spy a caliche-stained surface.  It looks like a dinosaur track, but it’s Permian time and dinosaurs have not yet evolved.  There are reptile fossils in the Permian, and some of them have similar tracks.  I look closer.  I’m just not sure.  It’s a partially exposed surface structure, with three distinct toe-like protrusions, and yet….  I take a photo and ponder it.  This is the Cedar Mesa Sandstone, a 260 million year old terrestrial desert dune, river, and lake deposit known to have fossil reptile footprints.  I finally walk on, but look back once more.  Geology is a science of uncertainty.  Was that a track or not?  I’ll never know.

My watch says 3 pm.  The mid afternoon air has warmed into the upper 50s.  I climb out of Big Spring Canyon and walk to a nearby knoll.  The drainage here is shallow, a quarter mile wide and bisected by a network of tributary drainages, giving the impression of isolated buttes and lowlands.  I avoid delicate soil crusts by stepping on sandstone slabs.  I walk toward a downed juniper, a long dead inhabitant of the knoll.  The trail ahead is etched in my mind, the fork, the pinon ladder, the short tunnel, and finally the route along the ridge margin to the trailhead.  I rest for several minutes.  The air is still.  A few flying insects buzz by looking for a safe hiding place for tonight’s freeze.  I stare at the soil crusts, impressed by their delicate beauty.  A raven is soaring above, curious about the interloper on a log.  I’m deep in thought.  It’s easy to disengage from reality here.

I eventually stand up and retrace my steps back to the stream bed.  The trail diverges from Big Spring Creek.  Cairns tell me to walk northeast, the general direction to the campground.  Soon another signpost appears.  A left turn would send me back to Chesler Park and Druid Arch.  It’s too late in the day for that without a backpack and sleeping bag.  I turn right and follow the path for another half mile.  I approach my last ascent, up an inclined tree trunk stairway and another signpost.  A left turn here would take me to the north loop campground.  I stay right.  I reach the top of a well-rounded knoll, my first view of the campground and the distant mountains beyond.  It’s starting to cool but I still have low sun.  I climb further to another higher hill to improve my view.  It’s a short half hour walk to the campground, first downslope to a smooth hummocky plain, then along the south margin of yet another ridge, through a short tunnel formed by the partial collapse of a sandstone wall, and finally down to The Flat, and a last quarter mile of sage-covered plain.

While walking the pavement to site 8, I review my hike, more a stream of disordered thoughts about the best harrowing spots than a systematic evaluation.  Definitely a fiver, one of my favorite treks, right up there with Cascade Canyon in the Tetons, the coastal dunes of central Oregon, and Wright Peak in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.  My thoughts return to the signpost just below the notch.  I suddenly realize the sign had always been there, as long as I can remember, for five or more hikes over 40 years.  The trail over the crevasse was always the official route!  The NPS never changed it!  I always chose the unsanctioned track.  For some reason, the NPS removed the cairns since my last visit to discourage people from climbing up the spillway and over the saddle.  I guess the rangers just want people to have an exciting time.  I sure did!